For I could wish that I myself were accused and separated from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kin according to the flesh. (Emphasis added.)

Rom 9:3

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These are the words of St. Paul. Yes, he unselfishly says that he’d gladly be separated from Christ if his kin, the Jewish people, might come to know the Messiah. He would accept his exile, the loss of his own salvation, if they might believe.

His love of God and others was, to him, more important than his own welfare, his own plight.

Where does this selfless love come from? It is divine love. It is how God loves us.

God’s love is not the product of reason, nor does it arise out of need. Rather it is sacrificial. So much so that God sends His Son to suffer the agonies of human existence and be scourged and crucified so we might know the height and depth and width of His love of us, its timelessness.

I am one of the fortunate ones. My mother loved me in this way. She mediated the selfless love of God everyday, and more so in the many days, and weeks and months of poverty, uncertainty, deprivation and loss. Indeed, so did my grandmother and so did others in my mother’s family.

I saw the same love among my neighbors and in their families. I see it in the Navy Seals – men who, as brothers – as family, willingly train to lay down their lives for one another and for us. This is love divine. It is a love whose fruit is courage, and leadership. It is transcendent love. It is who we used to be almost routinely and surely abundantly – until exclusionary secularism and Leftist ideologues abandoned God and faith, in favor of change that reflected their selfishness and produced a disordered, wasteful, antagonistic state of existence now reflected in our culture and its institutions from government and mass media, to universities, to family and even poisoning the discourse between women and men.

For those who do not easily understand what a vital and indispensible role faith and belief, and the Judeo-Christian ethic, play in America, just recall when we once lived and loved like St. Paul.

It is time to undue the damage of exclusionary secularism, and discharge those who have done grave damage to this nation and to each of us.

Shalom.

On this day in 1999, Al Gore announced that he created the Internet. Some guy isn’t he.